


Debrief

by MollyC



Series: Snipers [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Clint's bad language, F/M, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Infinite Coffee, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 13:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6567442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MollyC/pseuds/MollyC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What exactly was Clint doing while SHIELD was falling?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Debrief

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [This, You Protect](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1752638) by [owlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlet/pseuds/owlet). 



Clint has never much cared for Afghanistan, and being on day sixty-one of an assignment that was supposed to last two weeks is not making him like it any better. He hasn’t even left the safe house for about five days, because the cover story’s starting to wear thin and it’s better if the conspicuously Not From Around Here don’t spend too much time where the locals can see them. Clint can speak enough Pashto to get to the train station or buy food, but his accent stinks and he’s obviously a foreigner.

Even the most dedicated gamblers can only play so much poker, Clint doesn’t like Spades, and no one else is interested in cribbage, and Clint’s weapons have been in the best condition he can possibly manage in the field since roughly day eight. He’s listened to every piece of music he brought with him twice. Trying to watch local TV is a waste unless their fluent speakers feel like translating, which they generally don’t. Clint has one unread book on his phone which he’s hoarding because it’s not like opsec allows him to log in to his account and buy any more.

On the other hand, there are some areas in which operational security can be stretched if you’re discreet about it, especially on an operation that’s been as ridiculously overextended as this one. It’s after dinner and Clint’s planning to go lie down and see if he can fall asleep when his other phone, a cheap burner purchased locally, vibrates in his pocket.

Clint’s mildly surprised to realize that it’s a voice call, not a text, and waves to the other members of his team as he heads for the roof access. As long as you keep your voice down it’s pretty private up there, and all of them have been using it as an escape from each other.

“Hey, Red, what’s up?” he asks as he straightarms the trapdoor. One way they maintain opsec is by not using real names. In theory it’s possible someone could be running voice recognition software and catch them randomly, but Clint’s not too worried about those odds without something to tip off the opposition. Even Stark’s AI would have trouble with that one, and Stark isn’t technically the opposition anyway.

Natasha sounds annoyed, which is all Clint gets over the crappy speaker of the burner. “I like Stan, I really do, but sometimes I want to strangle him with his star-spangled underpants,” she says.

Clint settles the trapdoor back into place and goes to sit on the edge of the roof. The small city glows off to one side; he faces the other way, out into the scrub desert, and says, “What did he do?” When Nat first got the assignment he didn’t envy her having to make nice with the original American Hero to make sure he didn’t crash any more planes, but it turns out that instead of being a well-muscled version of Racist Grandpa, Steve’s a pretty great guy and really only passively suicidal in a way that’s easy to mistake for bloody-minded willingness to fight. (Clint’s been on a couple of ops with him since the Battle of Manhattan and it’s been impressive as _hell_ to watch his skills improve, though he’s still pretty damn bad at monitoring his own left for some reason.)

Clint would pay money to know how Natasha found out Fury’s real middle name and thinks it’s hilarious, which she takes advantage of when they have this kind of talk. “Jethro sent us to bail out some friends,” she says, which means _hostage rescue_. Steve, Nat, and one or two STRIKE teams, then. “Except I had some extra things to get done on the way and Stan walked in on me in the middle of it and threw a fit because I wasn’t where he expected me to be.”

Clint leans back on his free hand and sighs. _Extra things_ is about as specific as she’s going to want to get on this line, but he’s guessing info extraction of some sort. Probably from a computer, not a live person, or Steve would have been even more upset. “And then he gave you the ‘your country is disappointed in you’ face the whole way back, huh?” 

“He seems not to have noticed that it isn’t technically my country,” Natasha agrees wryly. “I think he went to beard the lion in its den after, too.”

Clint doesn’t whistle because the sound wouldn’t carry well over the cell phone, but he thinks it pretty loud. “OK, that’s pissed.” Even Captain America doesn’t just yell at Nicholas J. Fury with impunity, though Rogers can look disappointed enough that Clint has seen it cow Stark. (Only once, but still.) “How’s he doing apart from that?”

Natasha pauses thoughtfully. “He’s not great,” she says. There’s real worry in her voice. “The annoying matchmaker routine isn’t getting any results. Though he did actually talk to someone on his morning run yesterday.”

“That’s good to hear,” Clint says. “I wonder if anyone’s bothered to explain that you don’t actually have to run every damn day, though.”

She laughs and says, “I think he likes it.” But then she sobers. “He’s...really not doing well. He still goes to Air and Space every couple of weeks. Talking to Margaret, I understand why he does it, but it’s not good for him.”

Clint sucks air through his teeth. “Still doing the sadness errands. _Not_ good to hear.”

“Yeah,” Natasha says. “And it’s going to take me months to build the rapport back up. Damn Jethro anyway.”

“He does what he has to do,” Clint says, though she’ll know from his tone of voice that he agrees with her.

“He gave me this job,” she says, “it’d be great if he didn’t also make me undermine it.”

“Jethro never does anything for only one reason,” Clint says, controlling the desire to snicker at ‘Jethro’. “But he should have given Stan a heads-up.”

“If that man could cut his brain in half so one lobe didn’t know what the other was doing, he would,” Natasha says, sounding disgusted. She and Clint are both professional paranoids, so their houses are not entirely glass-free on this subject, but Fury takes it to a whole different level. “Any news on when you’re getting out of there?”

It’s Clint’s turn to sigh. “We’re supposedly going tomorrow. But they’ve been saying that for eighteen days now.” Clint wasn’t happy about this mission to begin with and he’s not any happier two fucking months in. All of which Nat already knows, so he doesn’t bother saying it.

“Eventually they’ll have to either let you go or scrub the job.”

“Yeah, but at this rate someone’s poaching my parking space by now,” Clint says gloomily. He’s playing it up a little to entertain her, but he’s really tired of Afghanistan.

“Well, we were in the same time zone for about two hours, console yourself with that,” Natasha says lightly.

“That close? Be still my heart,” says Clint, and she laughs.

* * *

Early the next afternoon, the radio shrieks.

Everyone jumps. It’s early for the go-no-go, and besides, that's not the sound the radio makes for a routine contact. That's the _bend over and kiss your ass goodbye_ noise, and Clint grabs for his tac jacket because the most likely reason for that noise is that they’re going to have to fight their way out of here. Van Allen gets to the table first, jamming the headset on one-handed as she punches the answer button. “Base, this is Sunflower, go,” she says, and pauses to listen.

Her mouth drops open.

“Say again, Base,” she says. Everyone’s staring at her, their hands busy with buckles because Clint’s not the only one whose first assumption was that they need to get ready to hold off the Afghani army, another alien invasion, or Bruce having a bad day. Van Allen listens, swallows, and says, “Acknowledged. What—do we need to extract? ...all right. Acknowledged. Sunflower out.” She sits back, pushing the headset off so it drops into her lap. No one says a word while she breathes out. “That was Deputy Director Hill,” Van Allen says at last. “Director Fury is dead.”

Clint extracts himself from the riot the room immediately breaks into as soon as he can without being obvious about it and pulls out his burner. The pause while it rings feels endless.

“Yes,” Natasha says, and she’s not saying hi, she’s answering the question.

“What the _actual_ fuck?” Clint demands. He always sort of assumed that if Fury bought the farm they'd just decant the next one.

“I was in the observation room. I saw him. I saw him die.” Natasha’s voice is hard and brittle as glass.

 _Oh fucking shit_ , Clint thinks. When Clint and Phil brought Nat in, Fury was the one who had to clear her. He had to decide whether the Black Widow could be trusted, and for trusting her he got…

Well, Natasha’s possibly the best hand-to-hand fighter Clint has ever seen, and he’s seen Captain fucking America. Steve beats her more times than he doesn’t, but that’s because he’s got most of a foot and a hundred and fifty pounds on her (and, like Clint, is mostly immune to whatever it is she does that makes people make stupid mistakes when they fight her). If they were evenly matched in size and strength, Natasha would take Steve every time sparring, and in a real fight as they are Clint would put his money on her because she wouldn’t hold back, and Steve probably would.

She can extract information like she’s fucking telepathic, too; people who only sleep alone for fear of talking in their sleep (for the first time ever) walk into the same room as Natalia Romanova and spill the specific part of their guts she’s been sent to find out about. Even if they don’t talk, there are some things she just _knows_ about anyone she spends time with. She slips into and out of personas like changing sunglasses; Clint has seen a man who _had sex with her_ fail to recognize her the next time they met, though she wasn't wearing anything like a disguise either time.

And Natasha kills people who need killing without hesitation, remorse or enjoyment.

Fury knew what Clint was asking him to clasp to his bosom; he knew what the odds were that trusting her would mean letting the Black Widow waltz out with whatever she damn well wanted to know about SHIELD. He trusted her anyway, and for that he got one of the best covert operatives in the world and a loyalty that even Clint doesn’t understand all the way.

And that means that Nat is closer to breaking right now than Clint has ever seen, and that scares the shit out of him. It should scare anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds.

“Red, do you need me to cut and run?” Clint asks. The morning sun is hot on his neck. He’s trying to shock her out of her spiral, but the offer’s sincere too and he might do it even if she tells him not to, depending on how she sounds. Covert commercial will take much longer than he’d like, but if she knows he’s coming she’ll have something to hang on to.

God damn it, who gave Phil permission to die when _this_ shit was in the future? Clint could really use a fucking backstop here. Someone who’s on the same goddamn continent as Nat would be nice.

Natasha sighs, a release of tension, and says, “No. I have things to do. I need to talk to Stan.”

“What’s he got to do with this?”

“Jethro was in his apartment. Stan saw the shooter. Didn’t catch him though.”

OK, that does not compute; if Steve was close enough to see the guy, he was close enough to catch him. “Who the fuck outruns _Stan_?” Steve’s morning ‘jog’ consists of twelve to fifteen miles at a flat sprint; it’s not that he can run that much faster than anyone else, but he can keep sprinting for hours past the point anyone else would collapse of exhaustion. For that matter, what the fuck was Fury doing in Steve’s apartment?

There’s a pause. Burner phone speakers aren’t good enough to pick up what she’s doing but Clint can picture it: steeling herself. “You remember Odessa?” she asks.

“...holy fuck, Red,” Clint says. The Winter goddamned Soldier is in DC and killed Nick Fury. “I’m gonna—”

“Don’t,” says Natasha. “Don’t go AWOL for this. It’ll all be over before you can make it back anyway, even if he’s still in the city.”

And the fact of the matter is, if the Winter Soldier gets set on Natasha, the only thing Clint could hope for is that going through him would deflect the bullet enough to not kill her...which, given Odessa, is a faint fucking hope. Clint’s seen analyses of some of the Soldier’s probable kills; _he_ could have made all those shots, but he frankly can’t think of anyone else. “ _Bozhe moi_ ,” Clint says, a verbal tic he picked up from her and never trained himself out of because it makes people do amusing doubletakes.

“Yeah,” Natasha says, grimly amused.

* * *

Twenty-four hours later Clint hasn’t heard anything new, either officially or from Natasha. The whole team is edgy as hell and they’re all just waiting for the mission to be scrubbed. Clint has given in and started reading his book when the burner vibrates a text alert and he checks it.

Van Allen says, “Hawkeye, what’s up?”

Clint shakes his head and shrugs. “Nat wants me to pick her up some stuff on the way home.” That’s what the text says: _Grab some vodka for me at the duty-free NR_.

“So we’re just not even pretending to do opsec anymore?” Van Allen says, sounding amused and tired.

“Burner,” Clint replies in the same tone. “I know you’ve got one too, Grace, so don’t gimme that.”

Van Allen raises her hands in mock surrender. “My lips are sealed,” she says.

Clint sits for another twenty minutes, regularly paging ahead in his book, before he stands and snags his gear. “One nice thing about all this downtime,” he says. “I’ve got my maintenance routine down to a science.”

There’s some mumbled agreement but no one gives him a second glance as he meanders back to the men’s bunk room. No one else is back there. Clint puts his gear together and goes out the window without leaving a note, because _Grab some vodka for me_ means _Drop everything, find a hole and pull it in after you_ , and _duty-free_ means _don’t trust anyone_.

It’s not a long walk into town. Clint probably hits the train station before anyone realizes he’s gone.

* * *

It’s almost a month before he sees Nat again.

He picks her up at de Gaulle. Her hair is short and boring brown, but Clint doesn’t let that stop him; he has an excuse to be as effusive as he wants, and he plucks her off her feet and spins her around and they kiss right there in public, something Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff never do but Denis Aubon and Nathalie Robichaud can do without thinking.

“Deni, Deni, Deni, I missed you!” she exclaims in her perfect Parisian French.

He sets her down but doesn’t let go and kisses her again. “I missed you too, sweetheart.” People are smiling at them. “Come on, let’s go,” Clint says, and they hurry to his rental car.

She keeps up being Nathalie until the door of the hotel room closes behind them. Her body language changes like a switch has been flipped, and suddenly she’s Natasha again—though granted, a tired, not very happy Natasha. “Do you want to give me the story now or do you need to eat or sleep first?” Clint asks. She can’t sleep on planes unless there’s someone she trusts staying awake and stress (like, say, testifying in front of a bunch of panicky Senators who are slavering for blood) tends to shut down her appetite.

“I’m okay,” she says, and slouches over to the couch, flinging herself into it. “Come here.”

Clint sits next to her and she leans into him. For a minute they don’t talk, just holding each other. Clint’s aids can’t pick up the sound of another person’s breath, so he concentrates on the feeling of her chest rising and falling. He has no detail yet about how close he came to losing her, but he knows it was too fucking close.

“So you know how Steve’s best friend got shot off a train and he tried to kill himself a week later?” Natasha asks eventually.

“Yeah,” Clint says. He doesn’t see how this relates but everyone knows that story: Bucky Barnes gave his life in capturing Arnim Zola, who was the key to finding the Red Skull.

“And you know the Winter Soldier?”

Clint frowns.

There’s footage of the Soldier from DC, cell phones and security cameras; you can’t see his face very well but he was or is brunet. And a sniper. Possibly the only person Clint’s ever seen who’s as good a shot as he is.

Bucky Barnes was a sniper. Bucky Barnes was brunet.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he says flatly.

“ _Bozhe moi_ , don’t I wish,” Natasha says on a sigh. “Steve recognized him in the middle of that horrific street fight and just...shut down. It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen, Steve Rogers _giving up_ without a fight. STRIKE showed up right then and they’d have killed us if there hadn’t been news choppers in the air. Instead they played cop long enough to get us off-camera, but we’d still have been dead if Hill hadn’t been under cover with the team.” She pauses and Clint can feel her smiling. “This is why face-covering helmets are on the Evil Overlord no-no list.”

“Nat,” Clint says, “there’s no way. Bucky Barnes fell off a train into a ravine. In the Alps. In the snow.”

“Bucky’s whole unit was captured in ‘43,” Natasha says, in an eerily perfect impression of Steve. “Zola experimented on him. Whatever he did helped Bucky survive the fall.”

“He’d be 97 years old!”

“They were keeping him in cryo-freeze,” Natasha says, matter-of-fact like that isn’t some serious science-fiction bullshit. “He probably hasn’t aged more than four or five years. Plus, if whatever they did to him was like Steve…”

Clint winces. “He might just not be aging at all.” He’d happened to be around, the day Steve got _that_ bit of news from SHIELD medical. “Oh, wow.” They sit in silence for another few seconds, thinking (at least on Clint’s part) about how messed up that is. “But he didn’t kill him.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Nat says. “They fought on the last helicarrier and when we found Steve after it crashed...he’d been shot four times, one was a through-and-through in the gut. Stabbed in the shoulder. Beaten to a pulp. And as far as I could get out of him, the beating at least happened _after_ the helicarriers were going down. I think Steve was trying to get through to him, make him remember, and he didn’t react well.”

“Oh my _God_ , of course they fucking brainwashed him,” Clint says, leaning his head back to stare at the ceiling. 

“They did worse than brainwash him,” says Natasha quietly. “They programmed him like a computer. I saw his file.”

“Fuckers.” Clint has some feelings about mind control, OK? So does Nat, for that matter.

“On the upside, he hauled Steve out of the river after the crash. He has to have; Steve wasn’t in any shape to have gotten out on his own. And we found the place they were keeping him. There was...an apparatus. The thing they were using to control him. By the time Steve got there it was rubble.” She sighs. “He’s out on his own now, but there’s no trail of bodies so...”

“How’s Steve feeling about all this?”

“He wants to go after him.”

“Of course he does,” Clint says wearily.

“Clint, imagine if it were me,” Natasha says. “You’d come after me, wouldn’t you?”

He snorts. “I _did_.” He doesn’t like to remind her of Budapest, but it’s fair game when she brings it up.

“Exactly,” Natasha says.

“Wow,” Clint says, his eyebrows up. “Were they…?”

“I don’t think so,” Natasha says, and Clint will take her guess as fact. “But he loves him.”

Clint’s arms tighten and he props his chin on the top of her head. “Well, OK. Now that that bombshell’s dropped, I think you better tell me the story from the beginning.”

Natasha gives a little huff of laughter. “Well, first of all there’s Sam Wilson, who’s proof that Steve has a guardian angel…”

It takes her an hour, and by the time she’s done Clint is having a hard time holding back the shakes. It’s not like she doesn’t risk her life on a regular basis, but usually he’s _there_ and usually it’s not the Winter goddamned Soldier. And the next time he sees Fury he’s going to punch the bastard in his lying fucking _face_. “Wasn’t sure who to trust”, that asshole.

But for now she’s here, and Clint’s here, and they have a destination (Stark’s being _actually useful_ for once in something that doesn’t involve repulsoring people), and that will do until something better comes along. “Hey, let’s order food,” Clint says. “Stark’s paying, right?”

“Yeah, food’s good,” Natasha says, and sighs. “I think the next few months are gonna be very interesting.”


End file.
